[0:00] You are listening to a message from Southwood Presbyterian Church in Huntsville, Alabama.! Our passion is to experience and express grace.!
[0:30] I'll say this, I don't know if you saw, there was a pastor that did like 96 hours in a row.
[0:45] He preached for 96 hours, starting in Genesis all the way through Revelation. So two hours from now, it won't seem so bad compared to that. Let me, we're looking at really the issue of hasn't science disproven God?
[1:04] And I want to start with two stories, two real simple stories. I was on staff at a church and there was this elementary age girl that like, you know, during, you know, showing up on Wednesday for worship on Sunday, if she saw me, she would walk up.
[1:19] And only like how elementary age girls can do, she would go to me and she would say, Bill Nye, the science guy, and then walk off. Like, you know, and all the time.
[1:34] Okay, I get it. Bill Nash, Bill Nye, that kind of makes sense. I am not a science guy. Not even close. Not even close. Second story.
[1:46] I moved to Huntsville with my family in the mid-70s, 1975. And right away you could tell what was in Huntsville. It's NASA, right?
[1:58] It was really clear to me, even as a seventh grader at Whitesburg, that, you know, there was something going on. Because a lot of the kids in my class had parents that were engineers. And every school book report was on some aspect of the space shuttle.
[2:10] And I remember late 70s, I think it was probably the first time that they brought the space shuttle in on the back of that 747 that we used to transport it.
[2:22] And they flew it around town. It was so cool. I was so proud to be living in Huntsville. And I'm still proud to live in Huntsville. But if you are in Huntsville, there are a lot of PhDs, a lot of PhDs in this room.
[2:36] There are a lot of very smart, smart people. And it can be intimidating. It can be extremely intimidating. Because I'm not a science guy. And I know maybe some of you feel intimidated to talk about your faith, maybe with someone that's very intelligent, PhD, all that.
[2:56] I used to feel that way. But I found something. And it's not so much answers, like being able to answer every question, every objection.
[3:08] It's not so much that. It's actually a posture. It's a posture. And it's very ironic that I would say that because I have terrible posture. But it's a posture that we take because of who we are in Christ.
[3:25] And that posture is something that I want to point out and show you. So let's look at Psalm 14. This is the... Right now, we're going to look at the first three verses.
[3:37] Then we'll look at the verse number four. And at the very end of the sermon, two hours from now, we will look at the last verses.
[3:48] But let's start here. Let's start with verse one of Psalm 14. The fool says in his heart, there is no God.
[4:03] They are corrupt. They do abominable deeds. There is none who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven and on the children of man to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God.
[4:18] They have all turned aside together. All turned aside. Together they have become corrupt. There is none who does good. Not even one. I just want to stop there.
[4:29] The word fool, right? It seems like the psalmist is just, you know, calling somebody a name. But in scripture, in the Bible, a fool is not primarily someone who cannot see the truth.
[4:42] But someone who does not want to submit to it. Another way of saying that they suffer from destructive self-centeredness. And they respond to truth.
[4:53] And they respond to truth. God's truth. Revealed truth. They respond to that with an irresponsible gesture of defiance.
[5:05] The fool isn't someone that doesn't have the mental capacity to understand. The fool is somebody who does understand, sees it, but chooses to follow their own self-destructive heart on the matter.
[5:19] Whatever it is. Especially when God reveals his word. That's what a fool is. And that's what's being sort of mentioned here. And so I could summarize verses 1 through 3 this way.
[5:31] A fool knows the truth. In this case, it's the law of God. Because it says none do good. How do we know what's good? It's because God reveals what is good and what is evil.
[5:42] And we have to trust what he calls evil is evil and what is good is good. But a fool says no. I will determine what is good and what is evil. And so I am not going to listen.
[5:53] I'm going to go my way. It's an open disregard of God's word. God's truth. So in a commentary by Derek Kidner, he sort of ties it together this way.
[6:10] He says the last word on atheism, you know, the fool says there is no God. That's atheism. The last word on atheism is said in Romans 1.22. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.
[6:26] The judgment of that is vindicated in the sequence of verses 19 through 28. What can be known about God is plain to them. It's plain. But they did not see fit to acknowledge God.
[6:42] That is a fool. Now, next part, verse 4. So we see the fool that says there is no God. They want their own way.
[6:53] They're going to disregard God's word. And now they're going to use people to get what they want. Look at verse 4. Have they no knowledge?
[7:05] All the evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread and do not call upon the Lord. So there you have it. If we don't treat people as image bearers and if we don't look after the well-being of other people, and if we're only looking after our well-being, other people can be used to get what we want.
[7:27] And one of the ways that you can use people is you turn them into a caricature, meaning that, eh, that's just that. That's just them. That's how they act. That's who they are. And I can disregard them and I can use them however I want to get whatever I want.
[7:42] You're not looking after the well-being of someone else. And so in that regard, then you can just treat people like bread. And you can eat them up if you want to and spit them out.
[7:53] That's what's ultimately being said there. And so where do you begin, though? If that's what's going on, and I'm not a science guy, I'm naturally intimidated by those smarter than me, which is pretty much everybody.
[8:11] So where to begin to answer the question, hasn't science disproven God? So if we read those texts, those four verses, where do you begin? You begin with yourself.
[8:23] Start with yourself. By seeing yourself in those four verses. By seeing yourself as the fool. Right? Because we are practically an atheist when we know what God says is good and what he says is evil.
[8:38] And we want our own way. And so we're going to do the opposite of what is good. We are functionally, practically atheists as well. Does that make sense?
[8:50] Right? So we see ourselves in those first three verses, certainly. And then we see ourselves as the evildoer, the fool in verse four. Because when we don't look after the, oh, we only look after our own interest, but not the interest of others or the well-being of others.
[9:07] We are practically atheists. Because God's great command that Jesus said is love God with every ounce of your being. And love your neighbor as yourself. And so if we don't do that, we're the fool.
[9:19] We're fools. We're fools. And we're practically atheists when we do that. Because we're saying, I want my way, not God's. Because if we look at the life of Jesus, what did he do?
[9:32] He fulfilled the law perfectly. He was without sin. He fulfilled it perfectly. And he looked after the well-being of others. He looked after my well-being, which I needed rescue.
[9:45] You need rescue. He looked after our well-being and went to the cross. He lived out the opposite of a fool, completely and perfectly. That's our Jesus.
[9:57] And so truly, if we believe at all, because we were dead in our sins, as Alan said in his prayer, we were dead in our sins.
[10:07] And God made us alive. We were fools. And God gave us new hearts and made us alive. It's purely a gift that we even call upon the name of the Lord.
[10:17] It's a gift completely. And so you start there with your own heart. Because you can relate. Because if God rescued you, gave you a new heart, because you were a fool, lost, and never wanting anything to do with God, he called you out of that by giving you a new heart.
[10:39] If that's true, then there's hope for everyone. The truth that we are as much an atheist when we disobey God's law, don't follow it, it humbles us.
[10:52] But because we know God gave us a new heart and there was hope for us and we were lost, then we know there's hope for everyone. And so in that regard, where do you begin? You begin with your own heart.
[11:04] But confess that you are often a fool and surrender in a posture of bold humility. That's the starting point.
[11:15] That is the starting point. So now what is belief? Or rather, how does anyone come to believe something? Now I'm going to give you a big grand footnote here.
[11:26] I'm going to tell you who I've been stealing from. Stephen C. Mayer, he wrote the book The God Hypothesis. He has a documentary out that I think everyone in this room should see.
[11:36] It is fantastic. It's spectacular. It's called The Story of Everything. All about what I'm about to say comes from that, except when I'm quoting Tim Keller, which is he's all over this too.
[11:50] Because he did an amazing job, Tim Keller, synthesizing some of the things that we'll be pointing to that indicate there is a God that created all of this.
[12:03] Okay, so there's my footnote. You all ready? We're going to start talking about science stuff. For the past 2,500 years, there's been two stories, two predominant stories in our culture.
[12:17] One story that has moved along through the years is that this is all there is. It's a materialistic view of all that is, all the energy and all the matter that exists.
[12:28] And all that energy and matter has just sort of fell in place. We were just this lucky, lucky, lucky universe. Everything just sort of fell into place.
[12:39] It went from simple to complex. And that's the materialist view, essentially. And that's been a prevailing thought for, you know, many, you know, 2,500 years.
[12:54] That story. It's a story of the nature of reality. The other story is that there was a creator, a mind behind everything. The first story is that there was mindlessness.
[13:05] There was nothing behind what is and what we see and what we touch. Nothing. It just happened. Okay? The other story is there's a mind behind it all. There's an intelligence behind everything that's created that's out there.
[13:19] That there was a mind that conceived and executed and planned and created. And one of the major prevailing thoughts in our world is that of those two stories, only the one materialist side is true science.
[13:42] Science only happens in that story. That's the prevailing thought. It's the social imaginaries, Charles Taylor would say. It's kind of the accepted idea that science is just there.
[13:54] Because when you start asking about an intelligent designer or a god, you're out of the realm of science. And I don't believe that. I'm going to show you why. But that prevailing thought is so overwhelming.
[14:11] The sort of the naturalist, materialistic science mascot of the world right now is a very brilliant man named Neil deGrasse Tyson.
[14:23] And he says this. He says, because this idea that science cannot determine at all, nothing, of whether there's an intelligent designer or even a god. He says this.
[14:33] I have no problem if as we probe the origins of things that we bump into the bearded man. That's how he refers to God. The bearded man. If that shows up, we're good to go.
[14:46] Okay? No problem. And this is what he said. There's just no evidence. There's just no evidence is what he says. So you see, really, the idea is that science only happens on that story.
[15:00] Now, I think this is helpful. Sir Isaac Newton would not have referred to himself as a scientist. And primarily because that word wasn't coined until a couple hundred years after him. But in the late 1600s, early 1700s, he would have thought of himself as a natural philosopher.
[15:18] And in fact, the four pillars of like education at the highest levels have always been philosophy, theology, law, and medicine.
[15:31] When we lived in Atlanta, there was just a great pizza place across from Emory University. That's not there anymore, which makes me so sad. But in that pizza place, there were two paintings, two almost like life-size, six feet tall or so, of those represented those four pillars of education.
[15:51] Philosophy, theology, law, and medicine. And in that classical study, science would be under the philosophy heading.
[16:04] And so would art. And so for many centuries, there was just no idea that they weren't integrated somehow. And now in our world, it's like, no, science is over here.
[16:18] You really, the whole theology thing is separate. Like, absolutely separate. All right. So how can we know anything?
[16:29] That's a little bit of background. But we have to ask the question, how can we know anything? Well, there are three aspects of knowing something. You have to have truth. You have to see its relevance for your life.
[16:42] See how it's relevant. And then usually the experience as it's played out, you know, out in a practical way among people. I mean, you could say the science thing is you look at truth.
[16:56] Does it match up to how you're thinking about it? And are there a bunch of other scientists that think the same way? And that's one possible application of that. But with all that in mind, let's go back to those two great competing stories.
[17:11] Does everybody follow me so far? Trying to keep everybody awake, okay? Let's go. Let's keep it happening. So those stories are marching along. And going into the 20th century, all the momentum was for one of the stories, the materialist story.
[17:29] Because you have Darwin doing his thing, and it seems like this world has always been, and it seems like it goes from, you know, tiny, simple cells to very, you know, organized cells.
[17:41] And things just grow and evolve, and it's been here a long time. And that was the momentum going into the 20th century. And what happened with the discoveries in the 20th century, actually the last 126 years, they were unexpected discoveries.
[17:57] These were things that were not expected. The narrative of that story, that there's all that there is, is just that it is. It's not created. It didn't have a mind behind it. The momentum there was, everything that came out really pushes against it.
[18:14] They were unexpected. This is Stephen Mayer, a philosophy of science. He wrote the God hypothesis in the movie I mentioned, The Story of Everything. This is the quote. He said, no one expected that the physical universe of matter, space, time, and energy would have a definite beginning.
[18:31] Going into the 20th century, people were moving away from the myth of what's in Scripture, the myth in quotes. And there was no expectation that they would discover anything that really said this had a beginning.
[18:45] And then no one expected that the universe would be finely tuned against all odds to make life possible. Richard Dawkins himself, a famous sort of, you know, popular atheist, has confessed to being knocked sideways with the wonder at the miniaturized intricacies of the data processing machinery inside the cell.
[19:11] Those, we are not living in a vast, meaningless universe. From the forces holding the cosmos together to the instructions in the DNA in our own bodies, we see evidence that everything was intended for a purpose.
[19:26] That the story of everything is not blind, pitiless, indifference. But the unfolding of a design that all of us are part of. And this is the great line. This is at the very end of this documentary.
[19:37] And surprisingly, perhaps it is science that has revealed this. The contention of Stephen Mayer is that science is, made these discoveries, science is revealing a designer.
[19:53] That's incredible. Incredible thought. Now, we're going to look at those three things that he mentioned and I break it out this way. We're going to say, we're going to, these unexpected discoveries, and it's great to maybe think of them as clues.
[20:11] We're going to look at a beginning. And maybe the word I would have you remember is red light. We're going to look at a Goldilocks universe. And the word I would like for you to remember for that part is entropy.
[20:21] And then we're going to see a designer. And the word that might help you remember would be code. So let's start with the first thing. Let's start with a beginning. So Einstein, right?
[20:34] We all know who Einstein is, right? Albert Einstein, brilliant man. His general relativity theory and his books, early part of the 20th century.
[20:48] He began to look at the universe. And especially with gravity. And one thing I've learned is to sort of maybe think about it like a trampoline that in the backyard, if you put bowling balls on a trampoline and the canvas is time and space.
[21:08] And if the bowling balls represent, you know, large planets, stars that have a gravitational pull, you stick them on the trampoline, it bends time and space. All right?
[21:19] So he was looking at the universe and he said, man, gravity is this incredible force that's out there. And it seems my equations are adding up to a beginning.
[21:30] He didn't like that. He came from that story that said, no, everything is all that is. And, you know, he just didn't like this idea that his equations was pointing to a start. So he threw in a fudge factor, which sounds exactly like what I did in math.
[21:44] I would just throw in a fudge factor, you know. Show your work, Bill. You know. Okay, here, I need a zero right there. That will make it come to the answer. But he sort of did that. He called it a cosmological constant.
[21:56] Because he knew that if all out there was just gravity, then that gravity would start pulling on each other. And the biggest ball of gravity would start sucking all the other things in there. And it would be an absolute mess in creation.
[22:09] Absolute mess. And so he had said, there must be some other force out there that gives it its static where it just stays where it is. And so he threw in that fudge factor.
[22:19] So across town, across the world, there was an astronomer that was looking at the stars, a guy named Vestos Slipher.
[22:30] I wouldn't get any of these names on a test, by the way. I wouldn't remember that. But I do remember this. As he's looking, this is the early, you know, 20th century. The telescopes, not as good as they would be and keep getting better.
[22:44] But he was looking up at, like, nebula. And later on, they realized these were galaxies. But they had, they were emitting, I guess, what's called the red shift. And if you take a light and you shine it through a prism, it breaks up the light into colors.
[23:00] And this is one thing I do remember from physics. Roy G. Biv. We all know what that is, right? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. But it turns out the red, which is like electromagnetic, on the electromagnetic spectrum, is the longest wavelength.
[23:18] So that means that this Slipher dude, when he was looking up at the astronomer, everything was moving away because it was emitting that light, that red light. And so he's going, hey, everything's moving away.
[23:29] And Einstein, I don't know if he was aware of it, but just ignoring that. But he gets in, in 1927, Einstein gets in a cab, or maybe it's the other way around.
[23:40] This guy named George LaMatra, a Roman Catholic priest, Belgian priest, that was a scientist. He gets in a cab with Einstein, which sounds like the start of a joke, right? A Belgian priest gets in the car with Einstein.
[23:51] Einstein. But he's there, and this priest, scientist, he speaks up, and he goes, hey, hey, Einstein. He goes, I've done your equations, and they add up to a beginning.
[24:07] And he said, you know what helps me accept that? He said, they are discovering that these galaxies are moving away. They're emitting that red shift. And Einstein shut them down and said, beat it.
[24:19] You know, I'm Einstein, you're not. He dismissed it. Four years later, he gets invited to go out to California. Hubble, Dr. Hubble, he invites them out, and he goes, I want you to, you know, come take a look at what we're seeing.
[24:34] Because they had better telescopes, and they were charting every galaxy they could see. And all of them were emitting the red shift, the red light. Everything's moving out.
[24:46] So Einstein looks through there, and he admits. He said, he acknowledged that his fine-tuning of the cosmological constant, that fudge factor he had to stick into his equations, was the greatest blunder of his scientific career.
[25:00] So our universe had a beginning. Everything's moving out. Now the next thing. It turns out that we live in a Goldilocks universe, that everything is just right.
[25:16] Not too hot. Not too cold. Not too big. Not too little. Everything is just right for life. For life. And even Fred Hoyle, who, a famous scientist, pressed this idea of a steady state, that no, it's everything static and fixed.
[25:33] He had to change his mind when he started to look at the carbon. There's this thing that he did with carbon. We don't want to talk about that. But he has this famous quote, and it goes this way.
[25:44] He said, a common sense interpretation of the evidence suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics and chemistry to make life possible.
[25:55] Now he went from being an atheist to agnostic. He just goes, it's just, boy, it just seems this way. Somebody monkeyed with it. But we do see fine-tuning in our universe.
[26:08] But even more interesting, at least for me, and I want to hopefully make it interesting for you, is this idea of entropy. The idea of entropy is that things are disintegrating.
[26:20] Things are going from order to disorder in our universe, and we can see that. But it's amazing to think, like right now we're looking at a universe, and it's perfectly fine-tuned for life.
[26:31] And if you reverse everything and you start heading back that way, the law of entropy says things are going to get more and more ordered as you go further and further and further back. That means, and it's so interesting, and Jay Richard says this.
[26:44] He said, but there's another type of fine-tuning, and that's the fine-tuning of the initial arrangement of matter at the very beginning of the universe. Right? You take all the matter, you go back to the universe.
[26:55] And if you thought the idea of a big bang was one of order emerging from chaos, he said, get that out of your mind. It's exactly the opposite.
[27:06] What we have is the initial moment of exquisite precision and order. At the point of creation, precision. That's like a concept, right?
[27:17] It can be measured. But, like, how do you get precision? That comes from a mind. That comes from an intelligence. That points, even again, to a creator.
[27:30] And then the third thing, a designer, a code. We, you know, I love, I'm proud of Huntsville. Now we've got Hudson Alpha, right? The genome. All this cool stuff that's going on there.
[27:43] You go back to Crick and Hudson, who, you know, sort of formulated and expressed how the DNA molecule, how that is ordered. And how it's structured.
[27:55] The double helix. But even more important, they got the Nobel Prize for that. But Crick, one of the two dudes that discovered all that, he was a World War II code breaker.
[28:08] And so he's looking at the DNA molecule and he is seeing these chemical subunits. They're functioning like alphabetical characters in a written text. And so he's seeing this and he's able to decode and see how things are in order.
[28:24] And if you do it this way and not that way. He was pointing to a genetic code that is currently being looked at now. But you can have alphabets in a range.
[28:39] Like if you had monkeys typing away on a typewriter. What they type out is improbable. Because you couldn't have predicted whatever they type out. But it's gibberish. But when you have something that's typed out and it has a function.
[28:54] And if it has a function. Then that indicates a mind. The arrangement of characters in a specific to perform a function.
[29:04] In fact, whenever we see information like that. We see information. We trace it back to a source. Information always goes back to a source.
[29:16] Whether we're looking at software code or hieroglyphics. A paragraph in a book. If we trace the information back to its ultimate source. We always come to a mind.
[29:27] Not a material process. Because the discoveries in science in the 20th century. The last 126 years. Are all pushing towards a designer behind all of this.
[29:42] Okay. Deep breath. Where are we on time? Okay. So far so good. Let's go back to the three aspects of knowledge. All the scientists for the past 126 years.
[29:59] Have access to that information. It's out there. These theories. Everything is out there. It's peer reviewed. It's all this. You know, it's out there.
[30:10] The question really is. With these unexpected discoveries. What do you do with it? What do you do with it? Richard Dawkins.
[30:21] He's famous for being part of what I refer to as the boy band. The New Atheists. In the early 2000s. He had a book called The Blind Watchmaker.
[30:32] This is how he dealt with those unexpected discoveries. He said, Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
[30:43] Just the appearance. He also said, Far from pointing to a designer. The illusion of design in the living world is explained by Darwinian natural selection. So here's the deal.
[30:54] They come to a fork in the road. Two stories. They come to that fork in the road. One group of scientists. And they say, If you're a scientist, You'll probably go, I don't know, To the right.
[31:05] My left. But then there's the story that says, This has all been done by a creator. There's the intellectual mind behind all of this. And they go to the right. How is that? You know, What do we do with that?
[31:19] Is one science and the other one not? Well, There's this great illustration. Let's see if I can do it justice. It's done by Luke Barnes. He's a PhD astrophysicist.
[31:30] And this is how he said it. He said, Imagine you were a detective. Okay. And you get called down to this bank. It's just been robbed. And they've got the security video.
[31:40] And you sit there and you watch the security video. And you see the bank robbers come in. They go up to the safe. And on the right is this, You know, Security code. And they walk straight up to it.
[31:52] Punch in an eight-digit number. And boom. The safe opens. You have two things you can think. Either, Man, That was lucky. Those guys, They just walked up and said, I'm just going to think of the first eight-digit number.
[32:05] And I'm just going to punch it in. And it worked. That's one theory. The other theory is, It was an inside job. Somebody told them the code. And they went in and punched it in. Now, Here's the deal.
[32:17] He said, In his analogy, He said, Now, What happens? And what are you thinking? What are your expectations? If you're the part of the first theory that it was just dumb luck that they did this, Right before they punch in the code, If you pause the video, You would, The question is, What would you, Would you, What would be your expectation of them putting in the right code the first time?
[32:42] Your expectation would be, No way. Your expectation. The highest degree of certainty that you could say is, There is, There are millions of combinations.
[32:55] The fact that they would be lucky for that first one, Your expectation is, No, They'll punch in the wrong code. That's your expectation. And if that's that theory, It's just been dumb luck, Hmm, That's a toughie.
[33:07] But if you knew there was an inside job, What would you be your expectation as the finger is hovering over the code? Your expectation would be, They would punch it in perfect, And they would open it up, And it would be done.
[33:20] So, All that to say this, Right? We got two people come to the fork in the road, One says, This is all science, This other one, You guys are, The God thing, That's crazy. All right, Again, Maybe a little lengthy quote here, But it's possible, This is from Stephen Mayer, It's possible by random means, That some process, Would have stumbled on exactly the parameters needed to create a life-friendly universe.
[33:44] Right? That's what the materialists are hoping for when they go, Well, It's just dumb luck. We're going that way. He said, But, Our overwhelming expectation, If we consider the odds, Is that without guidance, We would get a life-unfriendly universe.
[34:02] Right? That's the expectation. If you just know it's all random, And there's nothing behind this, There's no intelligence, The expectation is, This would be an unfriendly universe.
[34:14] But, That's not the kind of universe we see. Instead, We see the kind of universe we would expect, If it had been intentionally set up for life, Suggesting that it was intended.
[34:24] Fine-tuning implies a fine-tuner. So, While chance is logically possible, Design or intention becomes the most reasonable, Inference. And scientists in the room, Every scientist looks at the data, And they infer certain things.
[34:41] They just, They do. And that's part of it. And so, And this is to paraphrase Keller. Guys, We're getting close to the end here. Just stick with me.
[34:52] He said it this way. As proof, Again, As proof, As proof, You have a finite beginning argument, The Goldilocks fine-tuning argument, The existence of information, Are rationally avoidable.
[35:09] You can rationally avoid them. Rationally. Okay, You can say, I think it's luck. Multiverse, Whatever you would say. However, As a clue, This is the difference.
[35:23] Is it proof? It's true. Science can't prove or disprove God. The existence of God. That's just not in its realm. But are there clues? Are there clues that would give you reasonable expectation that there's a designer behind all of this?
[35:40] In that case, Yes. So we don't have to say, Seeing the clues and saying there's a designer behind this is not outside the realm of science.
[35:51] It's totally inside of it. The question really is, What are you going to believe? And so then, Now, If we go back to the idea of, Like, What are the aspects of belief?
[36:03] So you have your friend, This person that's a, You know, A scientist, Or just somebody that's very smart. We just can't believe, I just can't believe in a God. You can say, Well, look. You explain as much as you can.
[36:15] You go, It is a rational, It's rational to accept Genesis 1-1. That in the beginning, God created the heavens. He created everything there is. It's rational.
[36:28] And if that's rational, Now you go to the second thing. You know, Personal experience. You want to get, Whoever it is that's questioning like that, Get them into the word. Because this is how God's revealed himself.
[36:40] That God, That is rational to believe in, Has revealed himself, In his written word, And in the word, Jesus. And even John, The apostle John, In the beginning was the word.
[36:52] Right? Going all the way back to Genesis, And he writes that amazing opening lines, To his gospel. And so, You get them into the word, To show how relevant this is to their lives. And then you invite them, To hang around with us.
[37:04] You bring them into the community, To see how it's lived out. Do you see your role in all of this? It's not to answer everything. It's for you to bow your knee completely to Jesus. To listen to him, Experience him through his word, Through his preached word, Through his written word, Through prayer, Meditate, All of that.
[37:23] And then to go and be in the community. Because we become clues for the world of Jesus. And there's your posture, right?
[37:36] John Lennox, Famous mathematician, Brilliant man, A Christian. He was on a very popular podcast. And he was answering all the questions, That I've been attempting to sort of do here. But the podcast host, Very famous guy.
[37:51] I was not familiar with him, But John Bartlett, He said, You know, I've had lots of Christians on, And you all do the same thing. He said, You have peace.
[38:02] I can see it in you. It's not all the great answers you gave me That's telling me something about What you believe. It's you. You exude hope. You exude peace.
[38:14] Your soul is anchored in something Deep And hopeful. See, That's where we want people to meet Jesus. In that world.
[38:26] Because it's relevant. There's hope. There's meaning. There's purpose. That's what we give. So, And that's our posture. I said it was a posture, right? Not giving answers.
[38:36] It's a posture. It's what Jesus, The Holy Spirit in us. Okay. And so let's wrap this up. Let's look at the last, Verses five through seven.
[38:47] Psalm 14. There they are in great terror. For God is with the generation of the righteous. Very simply. It just means God is with his people.
[38:57] God's with us. Verse six. You would shame the plans of the poor. That's talking about the fool. The fool would shame the plans of the poor. But the Lord is his refuge. See, the Lord is our refuge.
[39:08] We have everything. The Lord is our shepherd. We have everything we need. Jesus became poor that we would become rich. Being poor is, We have the kingdom of God.
[39:20] Right? And that posture, That place where we rest in Jesus, That posture is everything. Because we have peace. Because we have looked at the evidence.
[39:32] It plays out in our lives. And I have seen it in other people. And then verse seven. Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion. When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people. Let Jacob rejoice.
[39:43] Let Israel be glad. Zion is another word for Jerusalem. Jerusalem was set on a hill. And outside of Jerusalem was another hill. With the cross of Jesus. And that's where he took our sin.
[39:56] It says in scripture that the day went dark. Midday. And I couldn't help but think, This is new creation. It is. It's playing out just how God created everything.
[40:11] From the darkness. All the gravity of sin. All the gravity.
[40:22] All the gravity of our sin. All the gravity and matter of our sin. Concentrated on Jesus. Who if we take the sort of the law of entropy.
[40:32] He's perfect. He's perfect at that moment of new creation. You know, where from him. Is the salvation and the forgiveness of sins.
[40:44] And it's as if like the, He's perfect. And it just goes out from him through us. We become the image bearers.
[40:56] The clues to this new creation. And I would even say, You know, the whole idea of the red spectrum. Where do we see red on the cross? In the spilt blood of Jesus. It covers our sins.
[41:09] And all placed on one man. Like all concentrated. And then this explosion. That now we go out as image bearers. To give clues to other people.
[41:21] That point back to Jesus. And Jesus, you know, experienced. Essentially with the relationship. With his father was broken. It was like the disintegration of his soul.
[41:32] But he did that for us. So that we don't have to experience that. And you know, there was a code. Written at that moment too. Because that moment was planned.
[41:43] From before the foundations of the world. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. In the happy land of the Trinity. Above all worlds. They executed a plan. To come and save you and me. So where do you stay?
[41:56] This is the last point. At the foot of the cross. Seeing the beauty and wonder of God's love. I want to close with this. I know it's long. Hang with me just a little bit more.
[42:08] There is a huge problem in evolutionary biology. It's called gratuitous beauty. There are things out in the world that are so beautiful. And they have nothing to do or are relevant for the survival of that species.
[42:20] It's just gratuitous beauty that's out there. Charles Murray in his book, Taking Religion Seriously. This is an atheist all his life.
[42:31] Very brilliant man. Came to Christ. Just recently. Wrote a book. That would be a good book to give an intellectual friend of yours, by the way.
[42:42] He said when things began to change for him and he began to wonder. Because he just accepted. He was in academic circles. And no one believed that stuff of Christianity.
[42:55] That was all myth. But something his wife said when she was holding their firstborn. She said this. She said her empathy was that she had trouble distinguishing where she stopped and baby Anna began.
[43:13] Her epiphany was that she loved Anna far more than evolution required. There is gratuitous beauty in the new creation.
[43:24] If we look at the cross of Jesus, it's referencing how he created everything. And what we are seeing is new creation. For Jesus, through us, we expand out into the world as image bearers and clues of a creator and savior.
[43:39] Jesus atones for sin and brings new creation. Our God is a kind God. He took on flesh to rescue us from ourselves. He left his fingerprints everywhere to feed our souls.
[43:51] So we can be his fingerprints and feed souls through loving well. Surrender all. That's what I would tell you, guys. Bow. Bow. The creation just points to an amazing God.
[44:02] The detail in the cell. He can handle and manage your details in your life. So go ahead and surrender. Surrender everything that you have. Your will. Your way. Your life.
[44:13] Begin again today. We serve a powerful, loving, and wise God. He has rescued you. You have nothing to prove, protect, or lose. He's making all things new.
[44:24] And the best is yet to come. Let's pray. Father, oh, Lord, that we would see the gratuitous beauty of just the lavish beauty of Jesus.
[44:38] Father, if there's been any confusion or anything that I've said, Holy Spirit, correct it somehow, maybe in the next hour. But, Lord, we bow a knee.
[44:51] We are just astonished at your creation. And it speaks of you and your detail and love for us.
[45:01] It's amazing. It really is. Thank you, Father. Amen. For more information, visit us online at southwood.org. Thank you.